Tag: post office

Yglesisas Answers it All

Matt Yglesias asks:

There’s no mystery as to why the National Republican Campaign Committee hates Nancy Pelosi, but their dislike for San Francisco is a bit puzzling.

Almost directly, and seemingly without realizing it, Matt Yglesias also provides the answer:

[San Francisco is] an enormous economic success story. The San Francisco metropolitan area has the fourth-highest median household income in the country, with its Bay Area partner San Jose coming in at number three. Metro San Francisco is in a tie for having the third-highest-pay for low-wage workers, its fourth in median wages, and third in 90th percentile wages.

GOP orthodoxy requires “government” of any kind to be an abject and self-evident failure. Few citizens of the US would dispute the sense that San Francisco is the liberal bastion of the United States. Therefore it must be an urban hellhole and not be visited by any kind of success. Where success exists, it must be ignored. Similarly, old Taxachusetts must be forever suffering under the yoke of ludicrously high taxes (and one must never acknowledge the reality: that MA’s effective tax rates and collective tax burden generally trend lower than those of old Live Free or Die itself, that glibertarian heaven called New Hampshire).

Much like the Post Office and many other examples, any functioning example of government, large or small, must be (at a minimum) denigrated. If possible, it must also be actively undermined such that it may then be pointed to as an example of the impossibility of government intervention, large or small. All evidence to the contrary must be marginalized. And that is why the GOP “hates” San Francisco and largely assumes it to be barely survivable smoking ruin.

Post Office eBox

Has it occurred to anyone else that our Post Office, lately a money loser, needs some fundamental rethinking?

Rather than stop Saturday delivery or just raise the cost of a stamp, why not really think about what this organization should be doing long term.

America currently has among the lowest internet access speeds in the civilized world. Especially in more rural areas, there simply isn’t anything other than dialup. And won’t be.

So: gradually re-purpose the Post Office over the next 5 to 10 years. They’re already nationwide and maintain offices in every (or nearly every) zip code. Perfect. Make it such that any citizen can contract with them for internet access and email (and a permanent, personalized domain along the lines of lemkin.po.box or somesuch; yes, this means the government takeover of a new TLD: Shock, horror.). Price access rates inversely to market availability. It would cost more to buy PO.Box domains in, say, Manhattan, NY than in Manhattan, KS, based entirely on existing availability and a given market’s existing broadband penetration. This keeps the government from taking over broadband.
And, obviously, the Post Office itself wouldn’t run out there and start laying fiber, they’d more likely sub-contract somebody else to go do it; the real role of the PO here would be to write down some or all of the initial costs in exchange for longer-term cost recovery than any private firm can safely undertake. Structured properly, companies like Google would have a vested interest in seeing to it that such a nationwide project can be done quickly and as cheaply as possible. And would likely put some of their own effort behind it. This also has the knock-on benefit of requiring a lot of infrastructure investment and, more importantly, it creates a lot of jobs that are entirely or nearly entirely created through the private sector.

The point is: lack of broadband access in this country is a real and still developing crisis. We have a large operation tasked with enabling equal access to communication. So let them do that.